An Australian woman who cooked a toxic mushroom meal has told her murder trial she has long been a mushroom lover, but more recently developed a taste for wild fungi varieties that have “more flavour”.
Erin Patterson has pleaded not guilty to the murder of three relatives, and the attempted murder of another, after serving them death cap mushrooms at her home in Victoria in July 2023.
Prosecutors say she deliberately put the poisonous mushrooms in the meal but her defence team says it was a “terrible accident”.
Ms Patterson – during her second day on the witness stand – told the jury she began foraging for wild mushrooms during the Covid pandemic, years before the fatal meal.
Ms Patterson’s in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, were all hospitalised after eating beef wellington at the lunch and died several days later.
Ian Wilkinson, the uncle of Ms Patterson’s estranged husband, also fell seriously ill but survived after weeks of treatment.
After telling the court she accepted that death cap mushrooms were in the food she had served, Ms Patterson described foraging for mushrooms at various locations – botanic gardens, a rail trail near her house, and on her own property.
“I mainly picked field mushrooms,” she told the court, explaining she sometimes foraged with her two children.
She recounted the first time she tried wild mushrooms, cutting off a small part before cooking it in butter.
“[It] tasted good and I didn’t get sick,” she told the jury.
The court also heard she had bought a food dehydrator in April 2023, in part because wild mushrooms had such a “small season” and she wanted to preserve them for later use.
Asked where the mushrooms for the lunch at the centre of the case came from, Ms Patterson said “the vast majority” were purchased from a supermarket in Leongatha while some had been bought a few months earlier from an Asian grocery store in Melbourne.
She couldn’t remember “the specific purchase”, but had previously bought a variety of mushrooms – shitake, porcini, enoki – from similar stores, she said. Other times, she’d purchased “wild mushroom mix” or “forest mushrooms” which didn’t specify exact contents.
These store-bought mushrooms were often put in the same container as ones she had foraged and dehydrated herself – including in the months before the lunch – she said.
Earlier Ms Patterson had stepped through changes in her dynamic with Simon Patterson and her in-laws following the couple’s separation in 2015.
“In the immediate aftermath it was difficult… but that only lasted a couple of weeks… we went back to being really good friends.”
Her relationship with her in-laws Don and Gail “never changed”, she said.
“I was just their daughter-in-law – they just continued to love me.”
However, she told the court her relationship with Simon turned tense amid conflict over finances from October 2022 onwards, and she had tried to get her in-laws to mediate.
The court was shown expletive-laden Facebook messages that Ms Patterson sent to a private group chat, which were critical of the Simon, Don and Gail.
“I needed to vent… to get my frustration off my chest,” she said, and her choice was either to tell the sheep in her paddock, or speak to what she called her “cheer squad”.
Becoming emotional, she repeatedly told the court how much she cared for Don and Gail and how she wished she “had never said that”.
She also testified about a deep mistrust of the health system, developed after medical concerns she raised about her two children were initially dismissed by clinicians.
These experiences led to her decision to discharge herself early from the hospital after the toxic lunch in 2023, despite doctor’s advice, she said.
She also experienced health anxiety and did a lot of Dr Googling – searching the web about symptoms – which at different points in time lead her to falsely suspect she had a brain tumour, MS (multiple sclerosis) and ovarian cancer.
Ms Patterson admitted that she had never been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, despite allegedly asking the lunch guests to her house to discuss the diagnosis, but said her family had a history of it.
Ms Patterson is expected to continue giving evidence on Wednesday morning, local time, when the court reopens.
